Severance Package (12 page)

She entered into a clandestine, sex-only relationship with the mail guy—and every mail guy henceforth—even though
many of them had a devil-may-care attitude toward personal hygiene.

She’d even burned through countless cheap wristwatches, placed under the back tire of Murphy’s car—oh how relentlessly old school
that
was—to fastidiously track his movements.

Over three years of clandestine operations, she’d earned the sobriquet “Workhorse” a dozen times over.

And nothing.

“Keep watching him,” her bosses told her.

She did as instructed, only occasionally pausing to conduct other operations now and again. She was too valuable to waste on David Murphy full time.

That was when Nichole began to grow paranoid. Perhaps she was missing something when she was conducting her other ops.

Maybe Murphy knew about her, and conducted his other business when she was otherwise engaged. Just to make it look like he was being a good corporate choirboy, heading up a successful private business.

Maybe he had a way around her key logger.

Maybe he switched out her surveillance tapes.

Maybe he purchased bags of shredded nonsense from another company, and switched out his own shredded documents for a ringer.

Maybe he was on to the watches. An old-head like him probably would be.

Maybe he was just messing around with her head.

If that was the case, one thing was for sure: For six months now, Molly Lewis was helping him.

Her surveillance of David Murphy had become increasingly frustrating during the past six months, and it was too much of a coincidence that Murphy had hired Molly right around the same time. The moment Nichole first shook Molly’s hand, the bad juju alarms went off in her head. She immediately hunted
for evidence, had the Company screen Molly’s background hard, but nothing came up out of the ordinary. Born in Champaign, Illinois, to a conservative Catholic family. Attended a year of UI, agricultural college. Dropped out to marry an actuary named Paul.

But the only evidence she could find of any kind of intelligence background: the slightest hint of a Russian accent.

Which would be kind of weird coming from the lips of an Illinois farm girl with a maiden name like Molly Kaye Finnerty.

But Nichole swore it was there.

She wished she could confide in someone, ask if they heard it, too.

The only other evidence: her surveillance tapes. Pre-Molly, Nichole’s secret recordings of Murphy’s offices yielded innocuous office banter, phone conversations. But post-Molly, the tapes yielded literally nothing. Blank hiss. It was as if someone had waved a high-powered magnet over the tapes. Nichole switched to digital recording devices, but the result was the same. Even though she knew Murphy wasn’t sitting in his office all day in silence. The man loved to talk on the phone. Nichole had listened to countless hours of voice, piped through her ATH-M40fs Audio-Technica headphones.

So why dead air?

Molly listened to the blank tapes in search of an audio clue. An electronic pop or spike. Something to indicate the device that had wiped them clean.

And then she heard it.

Or she swore she heard it:
Zdrastvuyte.

Impossibly faint, at the edge of human hearing.

Zdrastvuyte.

Formal Russian for “Hello.”

The more she listened, pumping up her playback equipment
to maximum volume, the more she swore she heard two more syllables after the greeting.

Nee-cole.

Zdrastvuyte, nee-KO-ool.

It was all beginning to prick at Nichole Wise’s mind … until the day David Murphy made his next civilian hire: intern Roxanne Kurtwood. In Roxanne, Nichole saw a clear path to sanity.

Murphy’s organization was strange in that it blended operatives and civilians. Operatives ran the joint; civilians supported them.

Roxanne deserved more than “support” status. She was smart, versatile. Ivy League. From a family of Pakistani doctors. She had a flexible moral code. All that good stuff that makes for a good op. And not a trace of Russian in her speech.

Nichole decided: Roxanne would be
her
girl.

Nichole decided to recruit her slowly, bring her into the ocean one inch of water at a time. She hadn’t given Roxanne a hint of this, but quietly laid the groundwork. She hadn’t proposed this to her CIA handler yet, either. But he knew they were always looking out for new talent. She suspected they’d approve. Then they’d have two sets of eyes on Murphy. It would be hard for that snake to wiggle around two sets of daggers plunging into the grass, trying to pin him down.

Roxanne: her partner-in-training. Her savior.

And something even more important—something Nichole hadn’t known for years.

A friend.

Of course, it figured that she was dead.

After Murphy was shot in the head, and everyone decided to split up, Nichole had taken Roxanne by the wrist. “This way.”

“But …”

“Trust me.”

Nichole told Amy they’d check the elevators to be sure, but that’s not where she led Roxanne. First they headed to Murphy’s office, because whatever was going down, a burn of his office was probably next. It was the tradecraft thing to do. Molly’s betrayal was something Nichole had
not
seen coming. Every theory Nichole had about the Illinois farm girl went spinning down the toilet the moment she pulled a Lee Harvey on the big boss man. Molly hadn’t been hired to cock-block Nichole. She had wormed her way into Murphy, Knox, and was in the process of her own little hostile takeover of the company and all its assets.

But
whom
did she work for?

David’s own bosses?

Another intelligence agency?

Another country?

It killed Nichole that she didn’t know the answer.

“Where are we going?” Roxanne asked.

“Toward the elevators,” Nichole said.

Sure, they were headed to the elevator bank, but only as a shortcut to Murphy’s office. Out one side entrance and in another, a quick left, and they’d be in. Nichole would bar the door—no, wait.

First she would recover the pistol she’d stashed here and moved periodically over the past five years. Her Heckler & Koch P7. Eight 9 mm rounds. Not the most desirable weapon in the world for a firefight, but it would do its job here.

Because she was going to give the HK P7 to Roxanne, and then barricade them in Murphy’s office.

Nichole would instruct Roxanne to shoot anything that tried to come through the door. Use all eight rounds if you have to. Then Nichole would rip apart the office, gather what she needed, then do a burn herself. She’d get Roxanne out of there, make it outside, call for Company extraction. Pray she wouldn’t lose her job for missing something this catastrophic.

What if, after three years of undercover investigation, it came out that David Murphy was working for foreign terrorists?

“Nichole, the elevators are this …”

“Never mind. I’ve changed my mind. There’s something …”

But when she opened the door, she saw a blur of Molly Lewis shooting down the hallway, headed right for Murphy’s office.

So much for mourning the boss.

Okay, change of plans. First, map out an escape plan. Then go back and deal with the Russian farm girl.

“Follow me, Rox.”

“What? What now?”

Poor Roxanne. She’d seemed so carefree last night at the Continental. Bummed out about having to report to work in the hot city in the wee hours of a Saturday morning—for members of Roxanne’s generation, 9:00
A.M.
was indeed the wee hours—but still, able to separate herself from that and have a good time anyway. Cosmos and tapas. Flirting with boys. Laughing about people at work.

Now she woke up to have her boss threaten to kill her, a coworker die, and another coworker shoot her boss in the head, JFK-style.

And now her best friend (Nichole hoped, anyway) was leading her willy-nilly through the halls. She needed Rox to keep it together.

“You have to trust me,” Nichole said. “I know what’s going on here, and I know how to get us out of it.”

Rox, God love her, looked her in the eye, like a Girl Scout reciting an oath, and said, “I trust you.”

“We’re going to the other side.”

The half of Murphy, Knox that had lain fallow since 2003.

“First, the kitchen.”

For the past few weeks, Nichole had stashed her HK P7 in a white casserole dish in the kitchen on the other side of the office. Hardly anyone used the refrigerator over here. Even if someone did use this fridge, nobody was desperate enough to open up someone else’s casserole dish.

“You’re not seriously going to eat that, are you?” Roxanne asked.

Nichole pulled out the dish, peeled off the plastic top. A layer of cold peas was on top of a watertight Ziploc bag. Her fingers found the edge of the bag, and the cold peas went racing over the kitchen counter as Nichole unearthed the HK P7.

“Oh my God.”

Nichole removed the pistol from the plastic, yanked back on the slide, slapped a round in the chamber, tucked the pistol in the back of her waist. She wore her capris with just enough give for moments like these. It had been far too long since she’d had a moment like this. The adrenaline felt good cascading through her blood.

“Oh my God, you’re going to kill me.”

“No, darlin’,” Nichole said. “I’m one of the good guys, and we’re going to get ourselves out of here.”

Murphy had said he put the elevators on bypass, and rigged the fire tower with nerve agents. Murphy was certainly capable of such things. But what about the air-conditioning ducts?

Ah yes, air-conditioning ducts. Favorite of action movies everywhere across the land. When you’re trapped in a room and need to escape in a hurry, simply yank off the metal register—it wouldn’t be screwed in tight or anything—and shimmy on up in
there, even though modern air ducts are designed to carry air, not adult human beings, so even if you were able to fit yourself into the duct, you’d probably fall right through the bottom at some inopportune point, probably land on a cubicle and impale yourself on a No. 2 pencil. But that’s why we love action movies, right?

Life isn’t an action movie, though.

And Nichole didn’t want to use the air ducts to escape.

She wanted to use them to call for help.

Nichole moved down the hallway until she found what she was looking for. The air-return vent, which was about the size of a hardcover novel turned on its side.

“Give me your purse.”

“Why?”

“Rox, please.”

“Okay, okay.”

Roxanne never went anywhere without her bag—even 9:00
A.M.
Saturday morning meetings. And she never went without a full-size bottle of her signature scent: Euphoria for Women by Calvin Klein. Roxanne had been trying to convert Nichole for weeks now, offering her wrist for a sniff often and irritatingly. Nichole didn’t do perfume. She preferred a clean, freshly scrubbed scent. Irish Spring, if possible. Fancy scents make you easy to track.

But now, Nichole was glad for Roxanne’s perfume.

Because she was going to spray an ungodly amount of Euphoria into the air-return vent.

Nichole had read about a lawsuit years ago: In a nine-story law firm, a junior partner decided to play a prank on a coworker who had been caught going to a strip club. He bought a bottle of cheap perfume from a street vendor, then sprayed it all over his buddy’s office. On his seat. On his desk. On the carpet. In the corner. Enough to make the place smell like a lap-dancing stripper for at least a few days. Then the junior partner closed the door.

The problem was, the building’s HVAC system picked up the cheap perfume and redistributed it all over the building. The air-conditioning system wasn’t enough to strip away the scent, and soon, the building was overcome with
eau de stripper.

A secretary was allergic. Her throat closed up on the way to the hospital.

The junior partner’s career ended with a one-two punch of criminal and civil lawsuits.

Nichole didn’t want to kill anybody with Euphoria, but if it attracted the attention of building security, they’d have a better shot of making it off this floor alive.